Hard Work, Focus, Mindset, and... Luck?

 From this review of Michael Phelps' book No Limits:

Plenty of other anecdotes in the book directly undercut the starry-eyed thesis of No Limits. Late in 2007, Michael slipped in an icy parking lot outside a Buffalo Wild Wings (“one of those restaurants with a sports theme”) and broke his wrist, a setback that could have seriously jeopardized his training schedule, and his Beijing dreams. Thankfully, the injury was not more serious because the parking lot of a Buffalo Wild Wings is just about the saddest possible place for a premier athlete to meet their demise.

I guess Michael didn’t consider the reality that, as he was suspended in midair over that hard, hard asphalt, he was completely helpless in the face of an unfolding universe. A little gust of wind here, an unseen splotch of black ice there, and it’s say his ACL that gets shredded, and those eight medals go to someone not flat on his back in a parking lot. Phelps has always wanted to win swimming races very badly and he has worked very hard to do it. He doesn’t win any races without this drive, but he didn’t win the races just because he wanted it the most. It’s also entirely necessary that his life be a blessed chain of advantageous circumstances, from the dimensions of his body—essentially ideal for swimming—to sustaining only minor injuries at Buffalo Wild Wings to growing up with an older sister who trained to swim in the Olympics.

 

 Or, as Aristotle put it in the Nicomanchean Ethics,

 

Nevertheless it is manifest that happiness also requires external goods in addition, as we said; for it is impossible, or at least not easy, to play a noble part unless furnished with the necessary equipment.⁴ For many noble actions  require instruments for their performance, in the shape of friends or wealth or political power; [16] also there are certain external advantages, the lack of which sullies supreme felicity, such as good birth, satisfactory children, and personal beauty: a man of very ugly appearance or low birth, or childless and alone in the world, is not our idea of a happy man, and still less so perhaps is one who has children or friends¹ that are worthless, or who has had good ones but lost them by death. [17] As we said therefore, happiness does seem to require the addition of external prosperity, and this is why some people identify it with good fortune （though some identify it with virtue²）

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